Omar Khayyam and the Skeptical Tradition Against Islam

In 1859, the year that saw the first edition of Charles
Darwin’s The Origin of Species, there appeared The Ruba’iyat of
‘Omar Khayyam, the Astronomer Poet of Persia, an anonymous
translation of the quatrains of an obscure medieval Persian poet, who was
better known as a mathematician. Unlike Darwin’s classic which was an
immediate success(1), the first edition of Edward Fitzgerald’s inspired
paraphrase went almost unnoticed and was remaindered. But it came to the
attention of another skeptic, the poet Swinburne, and later the
Pre-Raphaelite Rossetti, who between them launched The Ruba’iyat
on its career of extraordinary popularity that remains unabated (2nd edn.,
revised and enlarged, 1868; 3rd edn., revised, 1872, 4th edn., revised,
1879, and with felicitous consequences for the history of English
poetry.(2)

The first that the West heard of Omar Khayyam’s poetry, rather than
his name, was probably in 1700 when Th. Hyde in his Veterum Persarum....religionis
historia (Oxford) gave a Latin translation of one of Khayyam’s
quatrains. In 1771, Sir William Jones in his A Grammar of The Persian
Language quoted without attribution a complete quatrain (in Persian ruba’i,
plural ruba’iyat)(3) and part of another, generally ascribed to
Khayyam:

Hear how the crowing cock at early dawn
Loudly laments the rising of the sun
Has he perceived that of your precious life
Another night has passed, and you care not?

*

As spring arrived and winter passed away,
The pages of our life were folded back.(4)

Several Persian quatrains were published in a Persian grammar compiled by
F. Dombay in Vienna in 1804.

Khayyam’s quatrains are independent epigrammatic stanzas -- in other
words, short, spontaneous, self-contained poems. Each ruba’i stands on
its own. Fitzgerald, however, makes them a continuous sequence: the
stanzas "here selected are strung into something of an
Eclogue."(5) Thus, far from being a close translation, Fitzgerald’s
version is a paraphrase of "exceptional poetical merits."(6) One
English scholar, E. Heron Allen, compared Fitzgerald’s version with the
Persian text and established that 49 quatrains are faithful paraphrases of
single ruba’i; 44 are traceable to more than one ruba’i; 2 are
inspired by the ruba’i found only in one particular edition of the
Persian text; 2 reflect the "whole spirit" of the original; 2
are traceable exclusively to Attar, the Persian mystic poet ( died c. 1220
); 2 are inspired by Khayyam but influenced by Hafiz, the greatest Persian
Iyric poet ( died 1390 ), and 3 Heron Allen was unable to identify.(7)

One scholar admirably sums up the qualities that caught the late
Victorian imagination, and that have endeared Fitzgerald’s Omar to so
many: "The Fitzgerald stanza, with its unrhymed, poised third line,
is an admirable invention to carry the sceptical irony of the work and to
accommodate the opposing impulses of enjoyment and regret. Fitzgerald’s
poem has a kind of dramatic unity, starting with dawn and the desire to
seize the enjoyment of the passing moment, moving through the day until,
with the fall of evening, he laments the fading of youth and the approach
of death. Several interests of the time, divine justice versus hedonism,
science versus religion and the prevailing taste for eastern art and
bric-a-brac, were united in the poem...."(8)

Edward Fitzgerald himself sums up the delightful nature of Omar and his
philosophy very accurately:

"...Omar’s Epicurean Audacity of thought and Speech caused him to
be regarded askance in his own time and country. He is said to have been
especially hated and dreaded by the Sufis, whose practice he ridiculed,
and whose faith amounts to little more than his own, when strips of the
Mysticism and formal recognition of Islamism under which Omar would not
hide. Their poets, including Hafiz, who are (with the exception of
Firdausi) the most considerable in Persia, borrowed largely, indeed, of
Omar’s material, but turning it to a mystical use more convenient to
themselves and the people they addressed; a people quite as quick of
doubt as of belief; as keen of bodily sense as of intellectual; and
delighting in a cloudy composition of both, in which they could float
luxuriously between heaven and earth, and this world and the next, on
the wings of a poetical expression, that might serve indifferently for
either. Omar was too honest of heart as well of head for this. Having
failed (however mistakenly) of finding any providence but destiny, and
any world but this, he set about making the most of it; preferring
rather to soothe the soul through the senses into acquiescence with
things as he saw them, than to perplex it with vain disquietude after
what they might be. It has been seen, however, that this worldly
ambition was not exorbitant; and he very likely takes a humorous or
perverse pleasure in exalting the gratification of sense above that of
the intellect, in which he must have taken great delight, although it
failed to answer the questions in which he, in common with all men, was
most vitally interested."(9)

Fitzgerald will have no truck with those squeamish or puritanical
scholars, like the Frenchman Nicolas, who pretend to see something
spiritual in Omar’s verses, and who interpret every appearance of the
word "wine" mystically.(10) Fitzgerald approvingly quotes Von
Hammer who wrote of Omar as a "freethinker, and a great opponent of
Sufism." For Fitzgerald the burden of Omar’s Song, if not "let
us eat," is assuredly "Let us drink, for tomorrow we die!"
Some may see Omar as a Sufi, but "on the other hand, as there is far
more historical certainty of his being a philosopher, of scientific
insight and ability far beyond that of the age and country he lived in, of
such moderate worldly ambition as becomes a philosopher, and such moderate
wants as rarely satisfy a debauchee; other readers may be content to
believe with me that while the wine Omar celebrates is simply the juice of
the grape, he bragg’d more than he drank of it, in very defiance perhaps
of that spiritual wine which left its votaries sunk in hypocrisy or
disgust."(11)

Here are some examples of Fitzgerald’s paraphrase of Omar [From
the 1st Edn.]:

II

Dreaming when Dawn’s Left Hand was in the Sky
I heard a Voice within the Tavern cry:
‘Awake, my Little ones, and fill the Cup
Before Life’s Liquor in its Cup be dry.’

III

And, as the Cock crew, those who stood before
The Tavern shouted: ‘Open then the Door!
You know how little we have to stay,
And, once departed, may return no more.’

XV

The Worldly Hope men set their Hearts upon
Turns Ashes -- or it prospers; and anon,
Like Snow upon the Desert’s dusty Face
Lighting a little hour or two is gone.

XX

Ah, Beloved, fill the Cup that clears
Today of past Regrets and future Fears --
Tomorrow? Why, Tomorrow I may be
Myself with Yesterday’s Sev’n Thousand Years.

XXI

Lo! some we loved, the loveliest and best
That Time and Fate of all their Vintage prest,
Have drunk their Cup a Round or two before,
And one by one crept silently to Rest.

XXII

And we, that now make merry in the Room
They left, and Summer dresses in new Bloom,
Ourselves must we beneath the Couch of Earth
Descend, ourselves to make a Couch -- for whom?

XXIII

Ah, make the most of what we yet may spend,
Before we too into the Dust descend:
Dust into Dust, and under Dust, to lie,
Sans Wine, sans Song, sans Singer, and sans End!

XXIV

Alike for those who for TO-DAY prepare,
And those that after a TOMORROW stare,
A Muezzin from the Tower of Darkness cries:
‘Fools! your Reward is neither Here nor There!’

XV

Why, all the Saints and Sages who discuss’d
Of the Two Worlds so learnedly, are thrust
Like foolish Prophets forth; their Words to Scorn
Are scatter’d, and their Mouths are stopt with Dust.

XVI

Oh, come with old Khayyam, and leave the Wise
To talk: one thing is certain, that Life flies;
One thing is certain, and the Rest is Lies:
The Flower that once has blown for ever dies.

LII

And that inverted Bowl we call The Sky,
Whereunder crawling coop’t we live and die,
Lift not thy hands to It for help -- for It
Rolls impotently on as Thou or I.

From the 4th Edn:

XIII

Some for the Glories of This World; and some
Sigh for the Prophet’s Paradise to come;
Ah, take the Cash, and let the Credit go
Nor heed the rumble of a distant Drum!

Notes:

The first edition of The Origin of Species appeared in November
1859, and the second only two months later in January 1860.

According to T.S. Eliot's biographer Peter Ackroyd, when Eliot read
Fitzgerald's Omar, "he wished to become a poet" [Peter
Ackroyd, T.S. Eliot, London, 1984, p. 26]. Here is how Eliot
himself recounts his epiphanic moment, after a period of no interest
in poetry at all: "I can recall clearly the moment when at the
age of fourteen or so, I happened to pick up a copy of Fitzgerald's
Omar which was lying about, and the almost overwhelming introduction
to a new world of feeling which this poem was the occasion of giving
me. It was like a sudden conversion; the world appeared anew, painted
with bright, delicious and painful colours." In later life Eliot
still enjoyed Fitzgerald's Omar but did not hold its "rather
smart and shallow view of life." T.S. Eliot, The Use of Poetry
& The Use of Criticism, London, 1975, p. 33, p. 91.

"The ruba'i, plural ruba'iyat, is a two lined stanza…, each
line of which is divided into two hemistichs making up four
altogether, hence the name ruba'i, an Arabic word meaning
'foursome'… The first, second, and last of the four hemistichs must
rhyme. The third need not rhyme with the other three, a point
Fitzgerald noticed, so that he made the first, second and fourth lines
of his quatrains rhyme:

Dreaming when Dawn's Left Hand was in the sky
I heard a Voice within the Tavern cry
'Awake my little ones, and fill the Cup
Before Life's Liquor in its Cup be dry.'"